


the coast is never clear

by andreaphobia



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Kayaking, M/M, She knows, Snorkeling, Surfing, beach vacay, pidge knows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2016-07-15
Packaged: 2018-07-24 06:01:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7496655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andreaphobia/pseuds/andreaphobia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The squad goes to the beach. Also, Lance teaches Keith a thing or two about ambushes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the coast is never clear

**Author's Note:**

> I got this one prompt about sending them to the beach and then this happened.

Their first Earth vacation came with a long list of house calls that had to be made before the ‘vacation’ part of the trip could happen. Priority number one was Pidge’s mom, who very nearly had a stroke when they all showed up on her doorstep, but was most assuredly pleased to discover that her entire family was not, in fact, dead and gone forever. This visit was followed by a massive dinner with Lance’s even more massive extended family, and—of course—pizza at the infamous pizza shack by the sea.

Then it was off to Hunk’s hometown of Oahu, where they found more beaches, various interesting species of wildlife, as well as a smorgasbord of gaudy cocktails that eventually had a scarlet-faced Coran belting out Altean ballads like a champ, to the acute embarrassment of everyone else.

After all this, it wasn’t easy convincing Keith to go outside again; there was only so much of being social that he could take, and by this time his well of tolerance for other people was running dangerously dry. However, once Lance had wrestled a T-shirt over his head (“ _So you don’t burn to a crisp, your Majesty_ ”), and bodily dragged him outside, Keith had to admit that it wasn’t as bad as some of the other places they’d been to. For one thing, the weather was beautiful—he could practically feel his body going into overdrive, producing all the vitamin D it would need for their next expedition. For another, he got to watch Lance wipe out repeatedly in a surf-off with Hunk, who was apparently right at home perched on top of a surfboard.

“Listen—it’s just that I’m out of practice, okay,” Lance said afterwards, slicking wet hair out of his eyes. He bore a strong resemblance to a cat that had fallen into a swimming pool, probably because the last wave he’d tried to ride had picked him up and then crushed him like a bug. “Aaand I let you win. Didn’t wanna embarrass on your home turf, and all.”

“Yeah, you really did me a favor there,” Hunk said lazily, tipping his shades back down over his eyes while sipping from a half-coconut.

Keith just smirked.

Of course, with Shiro and the princess in charge, they couldn’t just take it easy. No, there had to be scheduled “bonding activities”, for the explicit purpose of “bettering team cohesion”. Hunk was a good enough sport to at least have come up with something that seemed like it could be fun if it wasn’t done with a team of actual insane people, but then the final indignity was being forced to pair up with Lance in a kayak.

“No. Absolutely not,” said Keith. He was standing with arms crossed over his chest, in a way that he hoped communicate the sentiment _I would rather rub sand into my eyes._

“What he said,” Lance chimed in quickly.

“Didn’t know you guys could agree on anything,” Pidge remarked. She was quite pink despite her best attempts with the bottle of suntan lotion; for her sake, Keith hoped that this was a healthy glow, and not a sign of a severe, full-body sunburn. “Guess there’s a first time for everything.”

“Speaking of first times,” Lance said, wiggling his eyebrows in a way that he must have thought was suave, but actually looked like he had an epileptic caterpillar on his face, “how about I share with Allura? Maybe I could, uh, serenade you along the way? You know, if you thought Coran could sing, just wait until you get a load of _these_ lungs!”

“Not if I get a say,” said Allura sweetly. “Do I get a say, Hunk?”

“Of course, Princess.” Hunk started handing out mesh bags with snorkels and flippers inside them. “Put these in your kayaks, okay? And make sure you take care of them. I borrowed ‘em from my uncle, and he’ll be disappointed with me if anything go missing.”

For some reason everyone looked at him and Lance. Keith felt the backs of his ears growing hot.

“Look,” he snapped, “I’m a responsible human being, okay?” As he spoke, Keith tried not to think about that one aphorism that had something to do with protesting too much. (Besides, Pidge had told him that it was commonly misinterpreted and actually meant the opposite of what everyone thought it did, and he was inclined to believe her, because if you couldn’t trust Pidge when it came to matters of obscure literary trivia, who _could_ you trust?)

Over Keith’s shoulder, Lance said loudly, “I’m not, but I’m offended anyway!”

No one was listening. Allura and Coran were already waist deep in water, while Hunk walked them through boarding their kayak. Pidge caught Keith’s eye, grinned, and shrugged. Keith took this gesture to mean _Better you than me_ , and blew out a long, low sigh. He really ought to have stayed indoors.

*

“Hey, you big jerk! Watch where you’re rowing! And watch where you’re going!” This was Lance, of course, haranguing him from the back of the kayak, the world’s most obnoxious backseat driver. “Why do you get to be in front, anyway?”

“Because Hunk said so,” said Keith, through gritted teeth. Once again, their paddles clattered together. Meanwhile, their kayak was drifting in a lazy circle, like an outsize yellow crocodile that had had too much to drink.

“Last one there’s a rotten egg!” Pidge jeered, whisked past in the kayak she was sharing with Shiro. She was barely paddling, but it didn’t even matter, for Shiro had the upper body strength of a team of oxen on steroids and generated quite enough thrust for the both of them.

Lance’s jaw dropped as he watched them go by, although perhaps this was only because Pidge’s taunt was so amazingly _lame_.

“You believe this?” he demanded of Keith, slapping the surface of the water and making the kayak lurch dangerously (Keith seized the sides of the kayak, willing it not to capsize). “We’ve gotta do _something_. Tell you what: temporary truce?”

Keith didn’t even look around. “Just shut up and row,” he snarled.

*

Ten minutes later their kayak coasted into a little inlet, far ahead of the rest of the squad, and Hunk had to holler to get them to pull up before they rowed themselves clean out of earshot.

“We won!” Lance crowed, while Keith breathed heavily, slumped down in the front of the kayak and possibly reconsidering all of the life decisions he had made to get to this point. “Hey, Pidge! Smelled any _rotten eggs_ lately?”

“Yeah, but don’t worry, Lance, it doesn’t have to be a lifelong affliction,” Pidge yelled back. “Have you tried using deodorant?” (Shiro, who was seated behind her, only grinned, as though he’d considered intervening, thought better of it, and was now just enjoying the show.)

“Oh, spare me the jealousy,” said Lance. “I won the race, and now you’re just salty.” As an afterthought he added, “And I guess Keith was there, too. Somewhat.”

“Why, just look at this,” Allura said, and though she affected innocence, Keith refused to believe she didn’t know what she was doing. “You _can_ work as a team when you want to, can’t you? I’m just _so_ proud of you two.”

As Lance began to sputter, Hunk said quickly, “Okay! So. Now that we’re all here, just come up by me and we can tie the boats together so they don’t drift off. Once that’s done, just get your snorkeling gear on and get into the water! Don’t leave this area, though, I don’t want to have to call the coast guard to come and get you.”

“A simply  _ingenious_ device,” said Coran, as he inspected the snorkel. “So simple—and yet so very _practical_. You humans really learn how to make do with your primitive technology, doncha?”

“Uh... yeah,” said Shiro, who was looking doubtfully at the child-sized flippers he was holding, until he realized that Pidge was holding a pair six sizes too large for her.

“You never told anyone what I said to you that one time I got caught in the explosion, did you?” Lance hissed, as they tied their kayak to the front of Hunk’s, forming a chain.

“No,” said Keith shortly, pulling flippers onto his feet. “I thought you forgot about that?”

“Oh yeah,” said Lance, after a pause. “Okay, well—don’t you ever tell anyone about the thing that I forgot, got it?”

Lance didn’t give Keith a chance to formulate a reply to this verbal diarrhea; he just threw himself overboard with an almighty splash. Then he surfaced again moments later, breaching the water like some kind of really ungainly suntanned dolphin.

“Okay, that’s colder than I thought it would be,” he gasped, the snorkel floating around his neck, held there by its strap but tossed around by the waves. “Man, I’m frozen all the way down to my _cojones_.”

“That’s okay,” said Keith, who found himself unable to resist getting a jab in. “I don’t think you were making use of them anyway.”

Lance mimicked taking a punch square to the face, and then grinned at him. “Hey, big talk from such a little guy. Don’t go acting like you’re getting some hot alien tail on the side, because I know for a fact that you’re not!”

Keith was just about to ask how it was, exactly, that Lance would know something like that, when he felt underwater hands grasping his ankles. Too late to react, he found himself pulled feet-first into the water by Hunk, and came up sputtering to find everyone just losing it.

“Oh man, you should have seen your face!” Lance cackled. He was struggling to stay afloat with how hard he was laughing, and Keith rather felt that if Lance drowned, he would have been asking for it.

“You _can_ see your face, if you happen to want to,” said Pidge, with a grin; she had something in her hand and was holding it up. Squinting against the sunlight, Keith saw that it was a camera, and tried not to groan out loud. Just what he wanted—to have an embarrassing moment immortalized so that Lance could make fun of him for it, for the rest of his life.

His crankiness quickly dissipated, though, as they pulled on their snorkels and began to explore the shallow waters together.

“Earth is so very beautiful,” Keith heard Allura murmur, after she surfaced the first time, and privately he had to agree. The water was crystal clear, cloudy only where the back and forth motion of the tide had stirred up the silt on the seafloor. Colorful schools of fish flit here and there, their glimmering scales catching and scattering the hazy sunlight that filtered down from the surface. Down at the bottom there were spiny black urchins resting on rocks and the odd grey crab, scuttling along the sand in a business-like manner.

Meanwhile, above the surface, Pidge and Lance were having an impromptu pun battle (“I’m just having a _whale_ of a time!” “Oh yeah? Well, I’m having so much fun I’m gonna have to sign a _wave_ -r!”), because Lance couldn’t seem to last two seconds without drawing someone else into some form of obnoxiously pointless competition. Nearby, Hunk, with Coran and Allura as his captive audience, was pointing out the more interesting features of a starfish.

“Having fun?” Shiro asked, drifting up beside him. He looked healthier and happier than Keith had ever seen him; apparently, beach vacations agreed with him.

“Eh. I guess,” said Keith. He was trying to sound ambivalent, but Shiro knew him too well for that. He gave Keith a smile, not at all patronizing, then swam on to join the impromptu starfish anatomy class.

Left to his own devices, Keith simply drifted for a while, letting the terrible puns wash over him (“I _boat_ you’ve never had this much fun before!”) while floating with the movements of the tide. Eventually, when he’d had enough of that, he took a deep breath, pulled on the snorkel, and dove, swimming a few feet down to get a closer look at the wildlife.

It was then that he noticed Lance, who was waving frantically at him from across a bed of coral. Actually—Keith squinted through the snorkel’s visor—was he _miming_ something? (It was so hard to tell with Lance; sometimes Keith thought that the best investment they could make in Lance’s ability to work with a team would be to get him acting lessons, seeing as he was such a fan of communicating through interpretive dance.)

Since Keith knew the odds were that this was yet another ill-conceived prank, he had half a mind to just proceed as if he hadn’t noticed Lance at all (a technique that the team used so often, it had its own name; Pidge, in her infinite wisdom, had dubbed it “Invisible Lance”). On the other hand, when he looked again, he could see four pairs of legs floating off to the side, not three, and realized that Pidge must have been unable to resist the siren call of Hunk’s marine animal knowledge. This wasn’t surprising, but it also meant that if Lance was trying to ambush him, he was doing it alone.

Still, he knew better than to proceed without caution, and remained on his guard as he ventured a little closer. When he’d gotten close enough, Lance gave him a little wink, then pointed in some random direction.

Thinking that he would probably live to regret this, Keith looked.

He looked, then looked some more, but there was absolutely nothing there—nothing but water, rocks, and sand. And honestly, he should’ve seen it coming, but it took him a second or two more to realize that he’d just been subjected to the underwater equivalent of someone reaching around your back to tap on your shoulder.

Annoyed, Keith turned back around, about to give Lance a piece of his mind, when it occurred to him that there was no oxygen to do so. And while he was still stumped by the impossibility of communicating his displeasure without stooping to Lance’s level and starting a game of charades, Lance took the opportunity to lean in and kiss him.

At least, he _tried_. The first attempt was a failure, because the only thing that happened when Lance brought his face in close was that their snorkeling masks collided, bruising their foreheads. But he moved swiftly, making a second attempt before Keith had managed to piece together what was happening, and that time he actually managed to bring their mouths together. The angle was awkward and honestly it was more just a brush of lips than an _actual_ kiss, but that’s what it was, unmistakably.

He pulled back, grinning; saw Keith staring at him, thunder-struck, and grinned even more.

 _Gotcha_ , he mouthed—and it was just like Lance to try to get the last word, even when neither of them could actually speak. Keith tried to punch him in the shoulder, but with all the water in the way it became more of a friendly pat. Lance laughed, then, bubbles streaming out of his mouth; he seized Keith’s arm and dragged him back to the surface, where they emerged one after the other, coughing to clear their lungs.

“There you guys are,” Hunk called over, having noticed their return. “See anything good down there?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Lance, sounding infuriatingly cool. “ _Loads_. Like you would not believe.”

Keith tried to ignore the way Shiro and Allura exchanged quizzical glances, or how Pidge, eyebrows raised, was trying to catch his eye. The backs of his ears were on fire again. He adjusted his face into what he hoped was an expression of casual detachment, and waited until the others were out of earshot.

“I’ll give you that one,” he muttered to Lance, as they struggled to climb back into their kayak. “But you’d better watch your back.”

“Ooooh, I’m so scared, I’m gonna have nightmares. Bring it,” said Lance, and he threw back his head and laughed.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](http://andreaphobia.tumblr.com) & [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/andreaphobia)
> 
> comments and kudos appreciated!


End file.
